The Road to Glory by E. Alexander Powell — Read

This is the forgotten story of the greatest ride. The history of the nation has been punctuated with other great rides, it is true. Paul Revere rode thirty miles to rouse the Middlesex minutemen and save from capture the guns and powder stored at Concord; Sheridan rode the twenty miles from Winchester to Cedar Creek and by his thunderous "Turn, boys, turn -- we're going back! " saved the battle -- and the names of them both are immortalized in verse that is more enduring than iron. Whitman, the missionary, rode four thousand miles and saved us an empire, and his name is not known at all.

Though there were other actors in the great drama which culminated in the grim old preacher's memorable ride -- suave, frock-coated diplomats and furtive secret agents and sun-bronzed, leather-shirted frontiersmen and bearded factors of the fur trade -- the story rightfully begins and ends with Indians. There were four of them, all chieftains, and the beaded patterns on their garments of fringed buckskin and the fashion in which they wore the feathers in their hair told the plainsmen as plainly as though they had been labelled that they were listened to with respect in the councils of the Flathead tribe, whose tepees were pitched in the far nor'west. They rode their lean and wiry ponies up the dusty, unpaved thoroughfare in St. Louis known as Broadway one afternoon in the late autumn of 1832. Though the St. Louis of three quarters of a century ago was but an outpost on civilization's firing-line and its six thousand inhabitants were accustomed to seeing the strange, wild figures of the plains, the sudden appearance of these Indian braves, who came riding out of nowhere, clad in all the barbaric panoply of their rank, caused a distinct flutter of curiosity.